The case for recording decision provenance in AI-assisted development.
How splitting AI work into separate contexts dramatically improves quality.
Human code review is no longer the proxy for quality it once was. AI has opened the door to MC/DC testing, property testing, and so much more.
AI models will do whatever you ask with absolute conviction - whether it's building a 3D world viewer or cheerfully rebasing away half your bug fixes.
The era of software restoration has arrived. AI can reimplement complex codebases in a weekend - but it's still parasitic on the original work.
The harness layer - context engineering, structured reasoning, and multi-call orchestration - is where practitioners can drive real capability gains.
How doing less leads to better quality in AI-assisted development.
Why treating your AI assistant well leads to better results - and what it says about us.
The industry is obsessed with speed. It should be obsessed with quality.
The two-year pattern from party trick to human-level holds for narrow tasks - but software is a collection of many tasks.
Introducing the Tollens blog. We'll be writing about quality engineering, agentic development, and what it means to ship with confidence.
How maternity leave, late-night feeds, and a Hetzner VPS led to a vibecoding awakening.
As AI writes more code, the hard problem shifts from generation to knowing what good means.
When it's cheaper to start again than to transform legacy software organisations.
Why agentic coding requires team lead skills, not technical depth.
Small teams with AI tools are about to disrupt bloated software organisations. The barrier to entry is now trivial.
How to create environments where quality thrives, without becoming the quality police.
When different stakeholders value completely different things, quality becomes a negotiation.
Why 99% test success rates can doom your test suite and your team's sanity.
Why your favourite quality metric is probably making things worse, and what to measure instead.
Moving beyond vague notions of quality to a definition you can actually work with.